Details

The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as havingimportant security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) basescores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for eachvulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.

The kernel packages contain the Linux kernel, the core of any Linuxoperating system.

This update fixes the following security issues:

* A race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel's ptraceimplementation handled PTRACE_SETREGS requests when the debuggee was wokendue to a SIGKILL signal instead of being stopped. A local, unprivilegeduser could use this flaw to escalate their privileges. (CVE-2013-0871,Important)

* A use-after-free flaw was found in the Linux kernel's memory managementsubsystem in the way quota handling for huge pages was performed. A local,unprivileged user could use this flaw to cause a denial of service or,potentially, escalate their privileges. (CVE-2012-2133, Moderate)

Red Hat would like to thank Shachar Raindel for reporting CVE-2012-2133.

This update also fixes several bugs. Documentation for these changes willbe available shortly from the Technical Notes document linked to in theReferences section.

Users should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backportedpatches to correct these issues. The system must be rebooted for thisupdate to take effect.

Solution

Before applying this update, make sure all previously-released erratarelevant to your system have been applied.

To install kernel packages manually, use "rpm -ivh [package]". Do notuse "rpm -Uvh" as that will remove the running kernel binaries fromyour system. You may use "rpm -e" to remove old kernels afterdetermining that the new kernel functions properly on your system.